Earlier this week, I saw Roger Waters performing “The Wall” live,
something I never thought I’d be able to see. Pink Floyd’s “The Wall
Tour” ran between 1980 and 1981, and I’d resigned myself to seeing
occasional bits of footage on classic album shows and such. I had high
hopes going into the concert hall, and wasn’t disappointed.
I’ve finished another audiobook: Henry David Thoreau’s Walden.
It’s one of the longest audiobooks I’ve been through so far. The reader
is quite good, and sounds a bit like the guy who does the tech quotes in
Sid Meier’s Alpha Centauri. So the reading itself is quite pleasant
to listen to. What about the content?
We recently pulled down the ship’s radar to send it to the friendly
neighbourhood techmagician. If you want to see some cool photos of the
inside of the radar (you should), Stephanie’s
got you covered.
One of the handy things about hoisting and lowering stuff on a tall
ship is that there are plenty of halyards and such that you can borrow
for a day or two. To get the radar down, we yoinked the nock staysail
halyard and the ship’s rubbish net. At sea, our rubbish bags get tied
down under the jibbom using this net. Its vaguely triangular shape made
it difficult to get the radar to sit straight, but we managed.
Darwin’s Voyage. Requires railroad. Costs 400 shields. Gives two free
techs on completion. That’s the Civ 2 perspective, anyway. The
high-school science version isn’t much better: Darwin rocks around the
Galapagos for a while, looks at birds and comes back with the theory of
evolution. They never mention that he spent most of the voyage
seasick.
I’m not usually one to get a nickname. I’d get the odd “Jacko”
occasionally, but that was about it. For some reason, that’s changed on
the ship. As an excuse to learn the DOT
language, here is a summary of my various nicknames:
Recently, we had another new person join the crew. She’s running a
blog of her own, and is a pretty good photographer and writer. This post about the
crew is probably a good place to start, for those interested.
A couple of nights back we had some pretty heavy rainfall and a fair
amount of water leaked into the chartroom. The water got into the power
supply for the chart computer, shorting it out. Fortunately, that
appears to be all it did to the computer. Unfortunately, the water also
got into this:
That label says “Endeavour(R) Security Dongle”. I’m not a fan of DRM
(Digital
Restrictions Management) at the best of times, but this is
ridiculous. If the water has wrecked the dongle, then we will have lost
access to our electronic charts. (We still carry and use paper charts,
of course, and do all the chartwork on them in parallel.) Making the
electronic charts depend on a non-waterproof dongle is a textbook Bad
Idea.
